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Wednesday, 30 December 2009

I was the 28th person to look this video in Youtube - found it through Twitter's Retweet feature - it was retweeted 3 times and one of them was Mari who I follow. The way WOM works is just amazing, the video has been posted just recently. Anyway I liked the video, it showed how to remove stuff from your views.

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

It happened last Thursday - Facebook introduced the feature I was waiting for a long time. I have nearly 200 friends in Facebook. They represent different groups: -(ex) my colleagues-my hobby friends-my family & relatives-my friends-my school buddiesetc

If I meet them in real life I share them different things. For others I tell more, for others less. For others I talk about my work, for others about my kids, for others about my hobb and for others about social media. I would not bore my mum telling her about the latest news in Twitter, I would not bore my old school buddies about telling my new dolls and so on. But until now that was the only option, I needed to share the same stuff with all of them and while they got bored I became tentative, mysterious and quiet. I wanted to share some news for part of the people but not with all.

So when the feature finally came I was so thrilled. :)

On Saturday I took the time and created groups. I have divided my friends into 3 groups based on how well I know them. I also have other groups, e.g. one for my foreign friends (now they don´t need to see my Finnish updates anymore), one for my dollhouse friends, one for my school buddies etc. I can filter the status updates only when I write them from pc (I use a lot of mobile FB) but anyway, I am so pleased now. This will change the way I use Facebook, I can now be more open and less boring.

Oh, they made also a trailer :D. I like to use videos in my presentations (as well as blog entries as you have probably noticed) and I am so happy I found these. It will be nice to start a workshop with this video :).

I am learning a new wiki platform which means learning new terms also. In Confluence there are e.g. labels (tags) and spaces (sub wikis).

From this video you will see how easy it is to create a space.

In a wiki you can have several sub wikis (spaces) and from the wiki´s main page you can easily follow the modifications in all the spaces. Within a space there cannot be two wiki pages with a same name while there can be wiki pages with the same name in two or several different spaces in a wiki system.

I have been working at Ambientia for a month now and to celebrate it I started blogging in Ambientia´s new blog. You will find my blog posts from here. And sorry for my foreign readers, I use only Finnish there, so I add a Google translation for you about the first entry. I am too lazy to update the links or to add the photo, check them from the link above.

An Ambient of the month

Hehe, I wonder what my new co-workers think about the title, but it is true: I have been working at Ambient for a month now... Before that I was working 11 years at Nokia. After such a long time it has been very refreshing to start in a new company - especially as I now work at the core business. Even if I changed companies there is a lot of familiar things too.

I work as a consultant at Social Solutions unit, whose main products are Atlassian´s Confluence and JIRA. Atlassian products can be purchased directly from them, but through us, the licenses are cheaper - and user support and customizations are in Finnish.

Confluence is a wiki platform. Three years ago I chose a wiki platform for my organization in Nokia and I have been a Mediawiki fan since then. My new boss Marko calls it a wiki for nerds which was a little provocative thing to say for me. But okay, granted, compared with Confluence it is certainly more challenging for beginners. Confluence is closer to the usual web sites, it is easier to create structures and, above all, it's easier to edit: if you can edit in Word, you can edit in Confluence.

A word about my hobby (if you google me you will find out it pretty soon): I started a dollhouse hobby 9 years ago. I did not know any of the practitioners, so I started following discussion boards. Through the hobby I learnt various Internet services, I shared my photos, set up a forum, website, blog, and, ultimately, the wiki. Three-year-old Nukkekotiwiki is very well known in Finland and this year it got an English sister. To promote the new Mini Treasures wiki I use social media tools: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

In hobby world technology is spreading faster than in companies. Maybe because people are usually so passionated about their hobbies and want to share them with others. Bringing social media tools into business world is challenging, because it does not mean only new tools but a new open way of working, it is a cultural revolution.

I brought my Nokia organization's internal communications not only wikis but also blogs. I hosted a popular blog called Hidden Treasure (and this blog is continuum for it). I was an admin and trainer, a web2.0 evangelist, but I also worked with agile software development. I was a product owner in a Scrum team and we managed our backlog in Trac. Trac and JIRA are both tools for managing tasks. JIRA is more versatile and, for example, and you can create metrics more easily. Ambientia is tailoring Jira according to customer requirements, e.g. by bringing the familiar terms and steps in it.

I am helping businesses to solve e.g. their communication problems, identify needs and implement exciting new operating environments. During the first month I have been in about twenty (!) client meetings and have seen many different use cases for Confluence and JIRA. I am also offering more common social media consultancy and training: I am giving dummy-friendly presentations a variety of the most common social media tools and I will tell about their use, technology and culture. So if you want to know more about e.g. Twitter, community management, challenges of the new open work culture, or how to used social media in job hunting, contact me.

You can find me in the following locations: Blogspot, Delicious, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Sometu.

Saturday, 14 November 2009

Another slide set by Harri. He and Pauliina Mäkelä were presenting Sometu in Mindtrek in September. I did not see that then but last week in DCL conference I finally met Pauliina in real life and we had a good chat - she is very inspiring company. :)

I also belong to Sometu but have not been that active there. Maybe I will when I move to capital area...

The title is in Finnish as the content of the slides is in Finnish too. I wanted to share Harri´s slides here as he has good points. :) Harri Lakkala was my colleague when I worked in Nokia promoting wikis and blogs in my organization and I was very inspired by the things he introduced to us. Now he has a company of his own called Intosome - keep an eye on him :).

Monday, 2 November 2009

Yesterday I was testing YouTube with my new Nokia N86 8MP and was amazed how well it worked :). Call me a geek but the second video I was looking for was about social media and so I found this blues. YouTube was tweeting that some users have problems with their videos and I guess I am one of them since I can´t see this now - I hope you can.

Thursday, 29 October 2009

A video shown by Mediataivas in Studia Generalia´s lecture today in Agora Jyväskylä. The topic was digital marketing and to be honest I did not get many new ideas which means I know a lot already. But if I have time I could share some points with you later. Meanwhile check this out, quite impressive:

Saturday, 17 October 2009

I was happy enough to get an invitation to Google Wave yesterday. To really test the Wave usage I need more contacts (I had one, the person who invited me and I don´t have any invites to send) but I could not find a way to find who in Finland are using it already. Perfect place for collecting this kind of list is of course Wave itself so I started to collect all Finnish Waver into one Wave. Interesting experiment. :)

Otherwise Wave looks really promising and I am really eager to use it, just need more contacts for that. :)

Monday, 5 October 2009

Today it is exciting day in Protomo: we have invited media here. At the moment Yle is interviewing us, after that it is Keskisuomalainen´s turn. At 12 anyone can come here so if you want to know more about us, come and see us in real life. See the invitation.

I just heard about Growyn and made some searches. Google generated links while Youtube and SlideShare did not find anything. In Twitter they have now 8 followers (including me) while in Facebook they have 2848 fans.

Growyn is a search engine just like Google, MSN and Yahoo! but with one big difference - we donate all our profit to support the environment. We believe that everyone wants to contribute to a sustainable future but for most of us, daily routines come in the way of a proactive commitment.

Growyn enables you to help save the environment by simply using our search engine!Every time you search the web through Growyn, money is generated to our projects.

Interesting project, good luck to you Kurdi&David. How about adding a Youtube video to spread the word also there? :)

Mainostajien liitto (association of advertisers in Finland) published their Mainosbarometri (ad barometer) study yesterday, they are doing the same study twice a year to their members.

Next year the advertisers are going to use their money especially to net advertisement, radio, and direct advertisement. 65% of the participants are planning to use social media (like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter) and 74% of them more than this year. The challenge in net advertisement is that the results are difficult to measure.

Monday, 21 September 2009

And now that I have introduced Protomo I can share a workshop notes from last week. Monkey business (they have the coolest web address: banana.fi ;) is the team behind the idea of bringing the Hub to Jyväskylä and they came to see us in Protomo with other like-minded people. For three hours we were brainstorming and this is what came out:

Hub could be e.g. a place where individual people or companies could go and work but it could be something else also. Hub is challenging the way of working - compare with Office nomad Janne Saarikko (in Finnish).

I.e. Protomo is a new Finnish innovation apparatus which is generating new know-how combinations and is proviking positions for entrepreneurial experts.

At the moment Protomo´s working mode is piloted only in Jyväskylä but it will spread to other cities next year. In practice Protomo is offering us e.g. office space, tools, and trainings until the end of this year. It is a great place to start a company or just test one´s business idea.

I belong to a team called Somenta ("Some" comes from SOcial MEdia of course). Besides the obvious social media trainings and consultancy we are also offering marketing services (it is still early to tell about our plans in details) but if you will learn more later...

Few weeks ago I read Patrick O´Keefe´s Managing Online Forums and as I promised him in Twitter to write about the book, here I go.

In his book Patrick gave a lot of new ideas about community management: practical guides for the daily work. Some tips were familiar to me from my own experience but as he has done the community management professionally (full time) and his audiences are bigger than mine he has thought about the issues much more.

I joined my first discussion forum in 1998; two years later I found a Finnish doll forum. It was a common forum for the lovers of dolls, teddy bears and dollhouses. I was among the first miniaturists who joined and soon we started to manipulate the discussion by the volume. Dolls and teddies have only heads, bodies, hands and legs, sometimes also clothes and shoes. But dollhouses, they are world of their own: furniture, dolls, collections, styles, massive amount of techniques that can be used. The topics with dollhouses were never ending and soon the doll and teddy lovers started to blame us for talking too much: nobody is talking about teddies anymore. Well, why don’t you start talking about them then?

As I was an excited newbie and as the technology was easy for me I started to contribute in the forum. I created structures for links and files and innovated new ways to use the forum. I started to talk with new members and answered to their newbie questions. I used much time for this but felt I was not appreciated, not by the forum owner, not by the newbies - and because the doll&teddy people I started to feel guilty when sending dollhouse messages.

So I started sending private messages with two other active dollhouse members. We were dreaming of a new forum, a different forum, a friendly forum where we could talk about dollhouses as much as we wanted. We knew what we wanted, a forum with rules. We spent many weeks for writing the rules before we told the others about the forum.

After the announcement the doll forum went crazy, everyone had an opinion about our new forum even though we told the forum is open for everyone who accepted our rules (e.g. no lurkers, real name required). It was exciting to wait if we are getting any members after the battle.

But since we had a good reputation we did of course and now after 7 years our forum is still active and as we have closed doors we can share also personal news - we have become real life friends. During the years we have done a lot together (e.g. the first Finnish book about dollhouse hobby). We have had difficult situations too but all in all we have done very well.

Patrick starts his book from the basics: choosing the platform and features, making the rules and hiring the staff. Hiring sounds little odd for me - who would work for a forum for free? But I did it and I still do. I do it because I am excited about the issue and want to promote it. At the moment the dollhouse hobby is almost too popular in Finland: the media has noticed us, we are seen in magazines, radio and television and the amount of blogs is hundreds. Somehow it is a pity although it is also cool: we made the difference and I made the difference. But it is only natural that after you have reached your goal you feel a little empty. So I have moved to a bigger playground than Finland.

In spring I set a wiki for English speaking miniaturists: Mini treasures wiki. Or actually, thanks to Google´s translators, it is for the whole world. I am only in the beginning in building this community but my experience with the Finnish wiki I set up 3 years ago is helping me. I have now an intuition that is leading me. It was nice to read from Patrick´s book that he and I have many common opinions about how to act in the forum: be real, be reachable, be open, and be honest.

So far my projects have been non-profit (ok, I did get some money from the book) so monetizing the forums is not my specialty. Affiliate programs are not very familiar to me, I have only some Google & Amazon ads. So the first thing I did after finishing the book was setting up a shop in CafePress. I do not want to send t-shirts to all over the world or ask money from my mini colleagues so having someone to do it for me is fantastic! And if nobody wants the fan products I am offering it does no harm to them - or to me. :)

Patrick talked a lot about difficult people&situations in forums and that was very valuable. So far I have got my fair share of them but if the wiki grows as I expect I will get plenty of more in the future and knowing the tricks he has used is a valuable asset. His tips for hiring the staff confirmed my tactic: not to hire someone because you need someone but because the person is what you need. Hiring wrong people will lead you to troubles. Patrick also gave hints of how to keep the forum interesting and how to invite people. All in all, it was really interesting to talk with Patrick (although I was only nodding in front of his book)!

PS. Patrick showed that he lives like you teaches (being open and reachable) - tweeting with him while reading his book raised the reading experience to new dimension. :)

Saturday, 5 September 2009

By now you have tens of accounts all over the Internet. And you have passwords. What do you want to do with them after you are gone? Do you want to give access to them to your husband, wife, kids or frieds? You don´t want to do it right away and you have heard the warnings not to write them down on yellow post-it notes.... What then?

Surprise, surprise, there are services for this case.There is Deathswitch in Germany andLegacy Locker in US. See the video to learn more.

I was very proud when I taught my mum to blog (with 360 which is now dead), it was very nice way of sharing news between her and my sisters. She is not yet in Facebook but do I really want her there after seeing this ;).

This is so obvious that is already ingenious. Do you want your customers be happy or unhappy? Happy people talk about you (so does unhappy people...), they are happy to pay more about your products, they are loyal and they do the marketing for you.

Wednesday, 5 August 2009

Last Saturday there was a wedding in my family. The wedding was beutiful (as well as the couple) and very well organized but still I was surprised by the way they wanted to share the photos after the wedding.

Now that everybody has digital cameras they could easily email them to the couple or burn them to a cd. Or they could upload them to their own photo services and send the link to the couple. But does this really sound easy?

They chose better way: they set up a secured server and printed instructions to the guests: this is the url, here´s the account details, choose upload and go. WOW. Just wow.

-Now I can see all the pictures uploaded (by people I don´t even know)-I can choose the best pictures to be printed to my album (instead of my own)-I can tag or comment the photos and-I can order RSS feed to see the new pictures :)

No wonder the service they used has got a web2.0 award: check Zenphoto for yourself when there´s a big party near you. :)

Monday, 27 July 2009

Facebook has lately changed their settings: now the default option is that the third party applications can use your pictures when they are advertising something to your friends. One example told by Katri from Gemilo is that a dating service used a picture of a recently divorced lady with a text: "she´s available again and looking for company" (Does this sound familiar? Maybe because you have seen this video).

Friday, 17 July 2009

I saw a video called Blank in Youtube. First it felt funny because of the example used: to buy a Blank or a Blank but actually it was a good example: you can choose the brands yourself - Coke vs Pepsi, Toyota vs Mercedes, Nokia vs Iphone...

So how is buying decision done? You search for information from Internet and from your friends. And when you are using the product you start talking about it in different forums in Internet and also in real life as an advocate.

At the moment I´m talking about different amusement parks in Facebook. First I studied a theme park´s home page and then asked my 150+ contacts if they are recommending it. I trust more to them than the official truth by the seller and in few minutes I got answers. And when a friend is reporting that they have visited a park I´m asking for comments - was it worth the investment?

This is the way people are making the decisions nowadays - with help of social media. Would you like me to help in reaching your advocates? If so, you can find me e.g. from LinkedIn - with 33 thumbs up :).

Tuesday, 7 July 2009

I call myself as social media expert as well and why is that? I´ve been a community manager since 2002, I have been blogging for 4 years, I own two wikis, I am networking via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Delicious (...) and the last 3 years have been bringing (defining and planning the usage, training, coaching and supporting) social media tools to Nokia.

Is it enough? :) My next job will be also about social medias - just like yours! Social media is going to change the work for all of us that´s sure...

-Flog, a fake blog, is an anonymous marketing blog hosted by a company

-Journalist blog is a blog hosted by a professional journalist published either in a media page or else where. It contains more topical than personal content.

-Media blog is hosted by media, it is concentrated to themes like occasions, opinions, comments or tests. It is controlled by the editor staff and is a part of the other web content the media company is providing.

-Microblog is a web service to which you can send messages from e.g. a mobile phone, www page or messenger. The entries are typically short and very often the location is shared. (Twitter is the most known microblog at the moment but also Facebook contains microblogging services. Finnish Jaiku and Qaiku are also microblog services.)

-Moblog, a blog updated via a mobile phone. (My very first blog started 4 years ago was a moblog - it made it possible to post about anything on the go - I didn´t need to wait until I was home. Moblog is good for e.g. photo blogs and microblogs but when ever you write a long entry with lot of links it might be easier to use a pc for blogging.)

I checked also Wikipedia´s Blog terms page and some additions from it:

-Audioblog, a blog where the posts consist mainly of voice recordings sent by mobile phone, sometimes with some short text message added for metadata purposes. (cf. podcasting)

-Blawg, a law blog.

-JukeBlog, a music blog of tracks from a specific genre or theme.

-Milblog, is a military blog while Warblog is blogging about war

-Mommy blog, a blog featuring discussions especially about home and family.

-Multiblog, a blog constructed as a conversation between more than two people.

-Phlog, photoblog, contains mainly photos

-Spam blog, a blog which is composed of spam, "doesn't add any written value."

Last week I got a LinkedIn invitation from a genius who was a fan of Michael Jackson. At the same time he holds several amazing positions:

-Owner of Global LINK SERVE-C.E.O of FORD-C.E.O of Toshiba Japan-Director in Nokia-Director in sharp Electronics-Director in Sony Electronics Company-Director in Lexus-Director in colgate Palmolive usa

He must be a busy guy...

What is really amazing is that he has got 15 new contacts after yesterday and there´s now only 2 people between him and me.

Why isn´t this account already closed? I would think LinkedIn notices if someone sents thousands of invitations in a short period and starts suspecting something weird. And if someone is CEO for several companies at the same time, doesn´t it ring a warning bell somewhere?

And what does the people think when they accept invitations from a stranger?

There is an option to report about spam in LinkedIn too but in this case I chose the option of I don´t know this person and after that there´s no way to report about the spammers. :P

Monday, 29 June 2009

First you have learnt to use RSS feeds and then you realize that not all your favorite pages provide one. :P

No worries, there is helping solution for you: Feed43 . I tried adding a page but to be honest the service was not that easy to use - before adding a feed I need to study more, e.g. the step-by-step tutorial which I will do later.

Sunday, 21 June 2009

Freedom: You can choose which feeds you subscribe while you can only choose some of your email delivery lists, others are given and some of them you can never leave because they are based on your organization not based your interest. So while emails are sometimes spam feeds should not be. Keeping the delivery lists up-to-date is taking a lot of time (can you add me to your list? and my team too? please remove me from the list! just add me back after my holidays) while with feeds the receivers do the same work.

Openness: When you receive an email that is sent to hundreads of people you can´t know what the other receivers think about it. It is not acceptable to use reply all feature but one replies only to the sender and then the sender might get the same question over and over again. If the same message is e.g. blogged receivers can see the comments posted by other readers and they don´t need to ask something that is already answered. And it´s not only comments - readers can sometimes contribute by voting or giving points to good entry.

Saved disk space: People are archiving their emails (and it might be difficult to find them again depending on the folder structures) - the same 1 MB email might be saved by thousands of people. The feeds from wiki pages or blogs are saved in one place (and if the writers are using categories and tags they can be also easily found afterwards).

PS. The summer vacation period has started in Finland so I wish you nice&relaxing vacation and when you go back to the office think about your communication. Could you do it better?

Saturday, 13 June 2009

A lot of people were excited when they got their "own" username in Facebook yesterday/today. There are so many services in the net these days and quite many of them require registering. Lately I have been using "jjanhone" and now my Facebook page is using the same id. :)

Thursday, 4 June 2009

Back in April I was giving a training in Lahti for Lappeenranta Technical University. I asked the students (people from middle management from several companies doing their MBA or Information Management studies) to share their email problems with me. The reason for asking is that quite many of the problems can be solved by using web2.0 tools - or just by using the emails with a proper style.

Problems with emails:

1. Emails are sent without a proper purpose and for too wide audience->everybody has their inbox full of emails and they need clean it all the time2. It is slow3. It takes a lot of disk space4. Paper wasted (! some people are still printing their emails)5. The important emails are not noticed (e.g. everybody is now using the importance High) 6. Emails are hidden by spam filters (or rules)7. Updating the delivery lists is a hard (and never ending) task8. You need to wait for the answer (How long should you wait? A week, a day, an hour, 5 minutes?)9. People are using emails with different styles, others are very formal and others chatty10. Emails are not always protected and people feel too secured when using emails11. People are "washing hands" by forwarding the emails (but I told you...)12. Overuse of forwarding/cc'ing (your boss is not interested of everything you do)13. Cc field: there are people who are ignoring all emails sent them as cc14. Email may be sent to wrong people (e.g. there are a couple of Johannas in my office and we keep getting each others emails from time to time)15. Someone may forward your message to people whom it is not meant16. Long threads-> it takes time to go it through to figure out why it was sent to you in the first place->there might be something confidential in the message that you are forwarding17. Answers to sender only - the others don't know what has been discussed18. You can get rid of some delivery lists19. Managing filters is painful20. Attachments are clumsy when the emails are read from a mobile21. Syncing the phone crashes if you have big attachments22. Email titles are misleading (or missing)

Wednesday, 3 June 2009

This is exciting! Last fall I participated to several working groups where we specified the tools and content for Symbian Foundation's (um, somebody should check the SF Wikipedia page) web. I voted for Mediawiki, trained the SF people to use it and am I proud now - the wiki looks so beautiful! Congrats! I also helped in gathering the content to the pages. Of course it is not finished yet (a wiki is never finished since things keep changing) but this is definitely a good start.

Want to see what I'm talking about? Read more from SF blog and register.

Mashups are web pages that collect information from other web pages with help of RSS feeds. They might be some sort of RSS feed readers optimized for some people but they can contain also completely new content (like where crimes happen in your neighbourhood).

One famous example in Finland is Ampparit showing news. Another example showing popular things in Twitter Twopular.

Yahoo has finally closing its blogging service 360 after 2 years of the first warning. It is suggesting to use the blog in Yahoo's Profile service instead. Oh my. I haven't seen anyone using that blog publicly but my friend moved her posts there and the user experience was very poor (e.g. no tags, no monthly archives, no themes, hard to navigate, hard to follow). The profile page seemed to me like a Facebook undressed. All in all this makes my really sad - I have been a Yahoo fan for a long time and now they keep pushing me away. First they closed the photo service, then Geocities and now 360.

Another option Yahoo is offering is taking your content and moving it to a new service. That's what I have been trying to do today but it seems that Blogger is not capable of importing the stuff (a txt file and a lot of pictures were what was exported from 360). Would WordPress work better as that is what is recommended there?

Tuesday, 19 May 2009

This is a very long video but it contains good thoughts. BTW we wrote a book for WSOY already 5 years ago in my discussion group. It was done completely virtually - some of us have never have met in real life.

Friday, 15 May 2009

Sorry for the Finnish title but can't help it. Uudet urat (new careers) is a portal hosted by Keski-Suomen liitto (the association for Central Finland). It was launched yesterday (read the press release in Finnish) and there was a workshop also for the users including me. Possible contents in the portal are e.g. opportunities for employment, entrepreneurship and education as well as questions related to unemployment.

I would have hoped to see more content in the portal already before the launch since it is always so difficult to start contributing from scratch. To see all you need to log in but already before that you can see something. There's e.g. a group for Mattilanniemen osaajat and a blog by Jouni Hynynen. Let's hope that many people will find a new career from the portal.

Wednesday, 13 May 2009

First of all I've been working with my wiki (Mini treasures wiki) which is the one and only dollhouse wiki in English (okay okay, there's one other but it is about a television program not about our hobby). I haven't sort of published it yet, only told to some friends but the word has spread and I keep getting hits from all over the world which is nice of course. But before announcing it officially I need more content and more contributors which is a tough job - starting a community from scratch.

That was a reason I participated Inforte Web2.0 seminar last week. The theme of the seminar was How to build a successful online community? The aim of the seminar was to present recent advances from research organizations and companies related to the area of Web 2.0 and social media. A special focus of the seminar was on developing successful online communities and promoting user participation and content creation.

I really enjoyed the presentations and got very good ideas, also from the audience - thank you all, you inspired me.

I also kept my first "Social media @ work" training for Lappeenranta Technical University in the end of last month (in Lahti) and I will continue with this training among my colleagues in Nokia Jyväskylä during the coming weeks.

This is the training ad:

Social media @ work (3 hours)

Social media (or web2.0) is a hot topic. Web2.0 services are used more and more for the communication outside the office but how should it be used in the office? What are the benefits and challenges? The training introduces some of the services and gives ideas for the usage.

When I create a training material I often call it "... for dummmies" and people find it funny (since they don't actually want to be called as dummies). "For Dummies" is however a synonym for basics, i.e. no background knowledge is required to understand the presentation. Now I found LinkedIn for Dummies video that tells you everything you need to know about the service :).

Wednesday, 1 April 2009

I just need to try this - can I make easy money with AdSense. Here are instructions how you add it to your blog. For my Finnish readers I recommend Mikko's Rahasta blog, he tells there e.g. useful stuff about AdSense. Check also AdSense policies in English or in Finnish

People normally hate ads but since they should be optimized for my blog you might see some links that are really interesting. If e.g. ten of you click an ad, they will pay me something like a buck. Yey - I'll be rich ;). Or maybe not but at least there's no harm done if I try out.

The problem with money making is that the regular readers won't come to my page, they follow the feeds with a feed reader. I noticed that you can add ads to feeds too, here are the instructions for that.

Saturday, 28 March 2009

So far I have been interested only in the Finnish blogs and used Blogilista for finding new blogs but now it's time to go little bit further. Yesterday I found Blogged and added Hidden treasure 2.0 there. Blogged is a service listing blogs by topics. The moderator rates the blogs but also the users can do the same. I was able to choose two categories so I added my blog to Internet and social networks. In the latter there's 277 blogs listed and my ranking was 173 - not bad from a blog this new. :)

Some of my followers are miniaturists (like me) so a tip for you: check the dollhouse blogs in Blogged and if you want to have more visitors, just add your blog there.

Thursday, 26 March 2009

Yesterday I told you about the bookmarking by Yahoo. After that a friend mentioned that Google is also offering bookmark support and that made me to think about Yahoo and Google and their services.

I started to Yahoo very long time ago. My first email address was in the university, second one in Nokia and the third one in Yahoo. During that time it was not possible to read my university emails from Nokia office or from home and vice versa - I could not read my Nokia emails where ever. So I needed an email address that I could reach everywhere and Yahoo was the answer (the other option was Hotmail). Ever since that I've been using Yahoo for my private emails.

Then I found Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Photos (that was terminated when Yahoo bought Flickr), Yahoo's website builder Geocities and Yahoo's blogging service 360. I'm also using Yahoo's bookmarks and My Yahoo which is a portal where I can manage several Yahoo services (e.g. email, address book, calendar, weather, Flickr, news, notes, maps - even Facebook).

But Google was chasing after me. First my friends sent me invitations to Gmail and I created an account. Searching the emails works really well but still I was not tempted to start actually using the email - all my friends were using the Yahoo address and I was too lazy to inform them.

When the Yahoo Photos ended I moved part of my photos to Flickr but as you can show there only 200 pictures for free I took also Google's Picasa into use. It works like a dream too. (I'm going to talk you about the different photo services later.)

Then there started to be problems with 360 and most of my friends changed to Google's Blogger. I was loyal to Yahoo and kept waiting the blog change they have promised for 2 years now... I still have 2 blogs there but I have also 2 Blogger blogs and they work like a dream.

Google has a home page too, it's called IGoogle and I took mine into use today. The variety of themes was amazing (compared to Yahoo) and there was a lot of services too: bookmarks, maps, weather, Google Reader, Gmail, YouTube and Facebook.

So why do I still hang around with Yahoo? The main reason: because my emails are there. Maybe I should move to the next level and really compare these portals and choose the one that does the tricks for me...

There's also one interesting portal by Nokia: Ovi. There you have your contacts (easy to move them from your mobile phone), your calendar, maps, music, games, files, Flickr and my favorite: Share. I use Ovi for sharing my pictures and videos but have only tried the other features.

But hey, can I finally get the first real comment to this blog if I ask How do you choose which portal you are using and what are the killer applications for you?

Monday, 23 March 2009

So I was the follower #100 in YleX and because of that I was interviewed in their blog. For the readers who cannot understand Finnish, here is the translation:

Moi jjanhone! How does it feel to be our 100th follower?Great - it's like being part of VIP team ;).

Tell about yourself?I'm Johanna Janhonen and I worked in the sexy web2.0 field: I help my colleagues in Nokia to use social media tools in their work. But since Nokia is leaving from Jyväskylä (where I work), I'm looking for a job, greetings to the head hunters ;).

Any hobbies?I've been lucky: I've combined my work and hobby, I use my spare time to find new cool stuff from the web. I keep a diary about my findings in my blog, see e.g. my Twitter hints and links.

What kind of music do you listen?Quite boring answer but I'm omnivorous what it comes to music. I listen a lot of radio while driving and when ever I hear e.g. my teenage favorites I sing along (but let's keep this just between us;).

When did you joined Twitter?9.3. - I am still a Twitter newbie. I had heard about Twitter earlier but only after the Yle's main news broadcast told that Twitter is hot also in Finland I needed to put my nose there too.

Why do you use Twitter?Because of my work: I like to familiarize myself to social media phenomena. My friends are using Facebook for sharing their news and I don't believe they are moving to Twitter very soon. But while Facebook is private (you share your status updates only to people that you know) Twitter is a public media: I have found e.g. celebrities, communities and my Nokia collegues, it's very easy to follow them, even by using a mobile phone.

How did you find YleX from Twitter?To get something out of Twitter you need something to follow and there are not that many Finnish sites in Twitter yet. I found out that my colleagues are following YLE News and I checked who else is following that. From that list I found some acquaintances and some new Yle sites, e.g. YleX and I happened to be the 100th follower :).

What kind of tweets you are expecting from YleX?Ads about YleX happenings, competitions and web page updates, just like you have done so far. If there is a lot of inside humor the followers might go away but you need to include some fresness and fun in the tweets too. Tell e.g. about coming visitors and song premieres.

Thanks for this and nice that you are following us!Thanks for the interview and good luck in occupying the new media. It's exciting to see how many followers you are getting now that you started to promote the service :).

Hidden treasures of social media

Johanna Janhonen started a blog called Hidden treasure in 2008 in Nokia´s intranet and opened this public blog as its follower in 2009 before jumping out of Nokia. In both blogs the topics are social media tools and culture. Early 2010 she started a Finnish blog about the same topics: Piilotettu aarre. Late 2010 she started a social media training&consulting company and named it after her blogs: Hidden treasure - Piilotettu aarre.